Last month a CHRF team had the opportunity to visit our relief efforts and feeding programs around the Philippines. Their journey led them to see many powerful and heart wrenching images, as well as find smiles on the faces of beautiful children that leave us at a loss for words.

A map of the Philippines, located South East of China, where CHRF has been working to better the lives of children for years .

Led by Project Coordinator Marcus Begley, the team helped local partners distribute school supplies, meals for hungry children, juice and clean water, as well as visit many school classrooms and therapy centers.

Hundreds of meals are provided by our very own CHRF Project Coordinator and one of our CHRF Board Members in the Philippines.

As you may already know if you are familiar with CHRF’s involvement in the Philippines, sexual trafficking is a large-scale problem with some organizations like UNICEF estimating perhaps as many as 60,000-100,000 children forced into child sex prostitution and trafficking every year. In order to help fight this TERRIBLE crime, CHRF works closely on the ground with our partners. We not only try to prevent further abductions by keeping children safe, but also provide care, therapy, housing and education for children who have been rescued or have escaped from the evil jaws of sex trafficking.

Countless young girls are kidnapped from communities like this one in the Philippines.

On the ground, near the large capital city of Manila, CHRF works with our partners to provide a therapeutic environment for young girls and boys who have suffered this atrocious past. At rehabilitation centers they can take weeks, months and likely even years to get back onto their feet and start to be equipped to once again live a “normal” life. During this time of rehabilitation, our partners closely monitor the children as they begin to interact with other kids their own age and eventually begin to trust, love and find joy and happiness. It is of the utmost importance that these children not only have a safe shelter, loving parental figures, consistent meals, but also a priceless education that can help enable them to break out of the cycle of poverty that has most often times trapped them into desperate and dire living circumstances.

CHRF Project Coordinator Marcus Begley provides children with school supplies in Manila.

And with the help of our committed CHRF donors, team and partners that is exactly what these children are getting! Only genuine love and care can heal a child who has been through such travesties, and that is what we at CHRF are dedicated to providing.

Many children that CHRF works to help have to scavenge through trash in order to survive.

Next our team visited multiple programs that are focused on helping some of the most vulnerable children and families that we could find. Indeed, these poor children and families live in some of the most terrible conditions imaginable. Under almost all of the bridges in the Philippines, families create small living “communities” that provide the most basic shelter you can think of. Imagine a “house” or “room” the size of a refrigerator box. Now imagine that same room with all of your life’s possessions and your family of five! There are no showers, usually no jobs, and very inconsistent meals. Life is suffering for these people. But with the help of our donors, CHRF is helping our partners in their efforts to bring care and God’s love to these children and their families.

A CHRF Board Member looks over the horrifying site of a “bridge community” as hundreds of people are forced to live in tiny, dirty and dangerous spaces in the Philippines.

First, by providing free education and a care center to these children, our partners work to help them understand how to break free from these impoverished living conditions. Next, many of our partners are willing to provide meals to even more children IF their parents will agree to attend classes on how to keep your children safe and healthy. There is already great progress and results coming out of these communities and we will continue to pray for many more!

A child stands in front of his community that is overflowing, dirty and dangerous.

As leader of the CHRF Philippine team, Marcus Begley shared: “It’s such an incredible opportunity to visit these projects where every single day the lives of hundreds of children are kept safe and nurtured. I know these countries in Asia, Africa, Central America and even Haiti can seem so far removed from our everyday life in the United States. The truth is that an unfathomable amount of children all across the Philippines and the rest of the world depend on good people like our CHRF donors to not only be educated but many times to stay alive! I can’t thank you, our CHRF donors, enough from the bottom of my heart for everything you have helped make possible around the Philippines, Asia and all over the world. Thank you!”

The CHRF Team with many of the children that we help to care for together thanks to the help of our donors!!